When and how will our sun die?

Scientific progress in recent decades, in the field of astronomy, has allowed scientists to gain more knowledge When and what will be the last days of our solar system star. What we can take for granted is that there would not be a human being on this planet to witness it!

There has been an arduous path of scientific debate to understand how the process evolved. At first, astronomers thought the Sun would turn into a planetary nebula — a luminous blob of gas and cosmic dust — but then evidence suggested it should be a bit larger. In 2018, the planetary nebula hypothesis appeared It gained strength again as the most likely final destination.

Before, increasing the brightness of the Sun would lead to the end of life on our planet

The sun is about 4.6 billion years old, based on the age of other objects in the solar system that formed around the same time. Based on observations of other stars, astronomers expect this It will reach the end of its life in about 10 billion years.

Other things will happen along the way, as detailed in Article from Science AlertIn about 5 billion years, the Sun will become a red giant. The star’s core will contract, but its outer layers will expand to the orbit of Mars. Swallowing our planet in the process. If you are still there at that time.

The sun’s brightness increases by 10% every billion years. This will end life on our planet.

But at this point, we won’t be here anymore. In reality, Humanity is only about a billion years oldUnless we find a way off this planet. This is because The sun’s brightness increases by 10% every billion years.

It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s such an increase in brightness Life on Earth will end. Our oceans will evaporate and their surface will become too hot to form water.

The ultimate path to the planetary nebula

What’s harder to pinpoint is what comes after the red giant phase.. Many previous studies have concluded that for a bright planetary nebula to form, a protostar must be more than twice the mass of the Sun.

but, 2018 study, published in the journal Nature astronomythey used computer models to determine this, like 90 percent of the other models stars, our Sun would likely shrink from a red giant to a white dwarf, then end up as a planetary nebula.

“When a star dies, it ejects a mass of gas and dust called the atmosphere into space. The envelope can be up to half the mass of the star. “This reveals the essence of the star, which at this stage of its life runs out of fuel, stops working and dies,” explains astrophysicist Albert Zijlstra from the University of Manchester (UK), one of the authors of the article.

Planetary nebulae

“Only then The hot core causes the ejecta shell to glow for about 10,000 years, a short period in astronomy. This is what makes planetary nebulae visible. Some are so bright that they can be seen at very large distances, tens of millions of light-years away, where the star itself is too dim to see.

They are called Planetary nebulae Not because it actually has anything to do with planets, but because when William Herschel discovered the first planets at the end of the 18th century, It was his appearance Similar to those planets observed through telescopes at that time.

Data model created by the team It predicts the life cycle of different types of stars, to detect the brightness of planetary nebulae associated with different stellar masses.

“Not only do we now have a way to measure the presence of stars a few billion years old in distant galaxies, a range that is extremely difficult to measure, but we also have We’ll find out what the sun will do when it dies!”– shouted Zijlstra.